At its iForum conference in Singapore on July 28, the Xen owner Citrix announced that its Citrix Receiver software for virtulized Windows systems would be extended to the Android platform. Until now it was available only in iPhone mobile devices.

Citrix Receiver enables communication among virtualized Windows systems and company road warriors so that they can collaborate on documents and share programs. The running programs and data remain on the remote system, only the keystrokes, screen activity and updates traverse the network. That's why emails or documents never get stored as such on a mobile device.

The Citrix Receiver works over a special Doc Finder program that makes it easier to navigate and modify documents in the corporate library. The App Viewer is a Web browser-like interface that uses the IE engine, but adjusts to the small mobile screen.

The Android project, according to Citrix, is entering a whole new working arrangement with the open source firm Open Kernel Labs (OK-Labs). The U.S.-Australian embedded developers were a spin-off in 2006 of the Australian National Center of Excellence for Information and Communication Technology and specialize in their dual-licensed OKL4 Microvisor for virtualizing mobile systems (based on ARM, MIPS and Intel). Linux is supported as a guest system, as are Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian with a bit of adjustment. The microvisor is available open source for noncommercial use and can be modified and further distributed. Downloads, however, need valid e-mail address registration.